Access to basic telephony service is particularly important for rural and isolated communities. Telephony access allows small-scale enterprises, cooperatives, and farmers to obtain accurate information on fair prices for their products and to access regional and national markets. Access also reduces the cost of transportation and supports the local tourist industry. By bringing markets to people via telecommunications, rather than forcing people to leave in search of markets, urban migration is reduced and greater income and employment potential are generated in rural areas.
Unfortunately, the last decade of the telecommunications boom has not alleviated the disparities between urban and rural communities. The average imbalance, in terms of telephone penetration, in Asia, for example, is over ten to one and is often as high as twenty to one. This means that a country whose urban markets have a penetration of four (4) telephone lines per one-hundred (100) inhabitants, e.g., India and Pakistan, has a rural penetration of less than 0.2 per one-hundred (100). The situation is more acute in most African countries and in some parts of Latin America. By comparison, the disparity in average income level between urban and rural residents in the developing world is usually less than four to one.
Current telephone systems are expensive to deploy. For example, a typical cellular system that includes a mobile switching center (MSC), a base station controller (BSC), and a home location register/visitor location register (HLR/VLR) can cost over $2.0 million. Moreover, such a system may require a minimum of ten thousand users in order to be economically viable. In many rural areas, the population is not large enough to support the installation of such a system. Further, in many cases, the conditions in which the equipment (e.g., the MSC, BSC, and HLR/VLR) is to be operated are extremely harsh and environmentally prohibitive. An alternative to such a cellular system can include a wired system, but the costs associated with deploying and maintaining land lines are too high for certain rural areas.
In deploying telephone systems in such situations, a further concern is how to expand an existing telephone system or implement a new phone system capable of operating with existing telephone systems. For example, it may be desirable to allow communications with users serviced by existing public switched telephone network (PSTN) services, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems, wireless communications systems, and other systems. Providing compatibility between these systems presents a challenge. Moreover, because some of these systems may be deployed in rural or other remote areas, providing a medium through which newly deployed systems can communicate with one another presents a further challenge.
Accordingly, there exists a need for an improved communications system that is relatively inexpensive to deploy and relatively inexpensive to operate, as well as able to integrate different communications systems.